Harris County Public Library - National Book Critics Circle Awardshttp://www.hcpl.net/taxonomy/term/5803/0
enFinalists Announced for the National Book Critics Circle Awardshttp://www.hcpl.net/content/finalists-announced-national-book-critics-circle-awards
<p>The National Book Critics Circle awards are given to 6 categories --&nbsp;autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.The award is judged by a panel of book review editors and critics and is one of the country&#39;s most prestigious awards.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Read the fiction finalists before the winner is announced on March 12!</p>
<p><a href="http://hcpl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/http:/search/results/?ln=en_US&amp;q=euphoria+lily+king&amp;rw=0"><img alt="" src="http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&amp;client=harrisp&amp;upc=&amp;oclc=&amp;isbn=9780802122551/LC.JPG" style="width: 100px; height: 152px; margin: 4px 8px; float: left;" />Euphoria</a>, Lily King</p>
<p>English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers&#39; deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, pulls him back from the brink.&nbsp;When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone&#39;s control. This novel is based on the true story of the life and work of anthropologist Margaret Mead.</p>
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<p><a href="http://hcpl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/http:/search/results/?ln=en_US&amp;q=lila+marilynne+robinson&amp;rw=0"><img alt="" src="http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&amp;client=harrisp&amp;upc=&amp;oclc=&amp;isbn=9781410474001/LC.JPG" style="width: 100px; height: 158px; margin: 4px 8px; float: left;" />Lila</a>, Marilynne Robinson</p>
<p>Marilynne Robinson returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church--the only available shelter from the rain--and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.</p>
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<p><a href="http://hcpl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/http:/search/results/?ln=en_US&amp;q=An+Unnecessary+Woman%2C+Rabih+Alameddine&amp;rw=0"><img alt="" src="http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&amp;client=harrisp&amp;upc=&amp;oclc=&amp;isbn=9780802122148/LC.JPG" style="width: 100px; height: 150px; margin: 4px 8px; float: left;" />An Unnecessary Woman</a>,&nbsp;Rabih Alameddine</p>
<p>Aaliya Saleh lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family&#39;s &quot;unnecessary appendage.&quot; Colorful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya&#39;s own volatile past. Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left. A love letter to literature and its power to define who we are, the prodigiously gifted Rabih Alameddine has given us a nuanced rendering of one woman&#39;s life in the Middle East.</p>
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<p><a href="http://hcpl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/http:/search/results/?ln=en_US&amp;q=A+Brief+History+of+Seven+Killings&amp;rw=0"><img alt="" src="http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&amp;client=harrisp&amp;upc=&amp;oclc=&amp;isbn=9781594486005/LC.JPG" style="width: 100px; height: 152px; margin: 4px 8px; float: left;" />A Brief History of Seven Killings</a>, Marlon James</p>
<p>From the acclaimed writer of The Book of Night Women comes a masterful novel framed as a fictional oral history that explores the events and characters surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley during the political turmoil on Jamaica in the late 1970s.</p>
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<p><a href="http://hcpl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/http:/search/results/?ln=en_US&amp;q=on+such+a+full+sea+chang&amp;rw=0"><img alt="" src="http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&amp;client=harrisp&amp;upc=&amp;oclc=&amp;isbn=9781594486104/LC.JPG" style="width: 100px; height: 152px; margin: 4px 8px; float: left;" />On Such a Full Sea</a>, Chang-rae Lee</p>
<p>In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class, descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China, find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan&#39;s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.</p>
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<script type='text/javascript'>stLight.options({publisher:''});</script>http://www.hcpl.net/content/finalists-announced-national-book-critics-circle-awards#commentsAwardsNational Book Critics Circle AwardsWed, 21 Jan 2015 17:25:51 +0000Krystal S17594 at http://www.hcpl.netEveryone's a Critic (But Only Some Get Paid to Be): Nat'l Book Critics Circle Award Winnershttp://www.hcpl.net/content/everyones-critic-only-some-get-paid-be-natl-book-critics-circle-award-winners
<p><img alt="Cover art: Bilyy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain" src="http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&amp;isbn=9781611735352/LC.GIF&amp;client=harrisp&amp;upc=&amp;oclc=" style="margin-left: 4px; margin-right: 4px; float: left; width: 90px; height: 136px;" /></p>
<p>Critics get a bad rap. It&#39;s the accepted wisdom that &#39;if you can&#39;t do, then teach, and if you can&#39;t do or teach, then tell people who can what they&#39;re doing wrong,&#39; which is unfair to teachers (who--in my not particularly humble opinion--get a worse and infinitely more undeserved rap) and critics, both.</p>
<p>I would argue that besides acting as a convenient whipping boy for artists who are seldom the best judges of their own work, critics provide the valuable service of drowning out a lot of the inane <img alt="Cover art: Stranger Magic by Marina Warner" src="http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&amp;isbn=9780674055308/LC.GIF&amp;client=harrisp&amp;upc=&amp;oclc=" style="width: 90px; height: 137px; margin-left: 4px; margin-right: 4px; float: right;" />palaver in the cultural conversation. Do they miss some very worthy work? Yes, oodles of it. Do they misjudge great works? Yes, certainly. Do they have personal biases and blind spots? Yep. Do they fall prey to fads and fashions that will ultimately be looked on only with derision and regret? Yes, just like you and me--how do you feel about those pea green jeggings you bought in a fit of hubris and reckless disregard for your credit score last month?</p>
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<p>This is all to say that the National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced and Harris County Public Library has most of them in the system. Will we be reading any of the winners twenty years from now? We&#39;ll see. Should you judge for yourself? Absolutely.</p>
<p class="rtecenter"><strong>The Winners and Finalists</strong></p>
<p>Fiction: <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=billy%20lynns%20long%20halftime%20walk&amp;index=.GH">Billy Lynn&#39;s Long Halftime Walk</a></strong> by <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=ben%20fountain&amp;index=.AH">Ben Fountain</a><img alt="Cover art: The Grey Album by Kevin Young" src="http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&amp;isbn=1555976077/LC.GIF&amp;client=harrisp&amp;upc=&amp;oclc=" style="margin-left: 4px; margin-right: 4px; float: right; width: 100px; height: 150px;" /><br />
(Finalists: <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=HHhH%20laurent%20binet&amp;index=.GH"><strong>HHhH</strong></a>, <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=orphan%20masters%20son%20johnson&amp;index=.GH">The Orphan Master&#39;s Son</a></strong>, <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=magnificence%20lydia%20millet&amp;index=.GH">Magnificence</a></strong>, <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=nw%20zadie%20smith&amp;index=.GH"><strong>NW</strong></a>)<br />
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Nonfiction: <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=far%20from%20tree%20andrew%20solomon&amp;index=.GH">Far from the Tree</a></strong> by Andrew Solomon<br />
(Finalists: <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=behind%20beautiful%20forevers%20boo&amp;index=.GH">Behind the Beautiful Forevers</a></strong>, <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=private%20empire%20steve%20coll&amp;index=.GH"><strong>Private Empire</strong></a>, <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=why%20world%20exist%20jim%20holt&amp;index=.GH"><strong>Why Does the World Exist?</strong></a>, <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=spillover%20quammen&amp;index=.GH">Spillover</a></strong>)</p>
<p>Biography: <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=passage%20power%20robert%20caro&amp;index=.GH">The Passage of Power</a></strong> by <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=robert%20caro%20&amp;index=.AH">Robert Caro</a><br />
(Finalists: <strong>All We Know</strong>, <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=portrait%20novel%20gorra&amp;index=.GH"><strong>Portrait of a Novel</strong></a>, <strong>Robert Duncan</strong>, <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=tom%20reiss%20black%20count&amp;index=.GH"><strong>The Black Count</strong></a>)</p>
<p>Autobiography: <strong>Swimming Studies</strong> by Leanne Sharpton<img alt="Cover art: Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon" src="http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?type=xw12&amp;isbn=9780743236713/LC.GIF&amp;client=harrisp&amp;upc=&amp;oclc=" style="margin-left: 4px; margin-right: 4px; float: right; width: 110px; height: 168px;" /><br />
(Finalists: <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=distance%20between%20reyna%20grande&amp;index=.GH">The Distance Between Us</a></strong>, <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=my%20poets%20maureen%20mclane&amp;index=.GH">My Poets</a></strong>, <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=house%20stone%20anthony%20shadid&amp;index=.GH">House of Stone</a></strong>, <strong>In the House of the Interpreter</strong>)</p>
<p>Poetry: <strong>Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys</strong> by <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=powell,%20d%20a%20poetry&amp;index=.GH">D. A. Powell</a><br />
(Finalists: <strong>Bewilderment</strong>, <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=spectrum%20possible%20deaths%20lucia%20perillo&amp;index=.GH"><strong>On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths</strong></a>, <strong>Fragile Acts</strong>, <strong>Olives</strong>)</p>
<p>Criticism: <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=stranger%20magic%20marina%20warner&amp;index=.GH"><strong>Stranger Magic</strong></a> by <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=marina%20warner&amp;index=.AH">Marina Warner</a><br />
(Finalists: <strong><a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=reinventing%20bach%20paul%20elie&amp;index=.GH">Reinventing Bach</a></strong>, <strong>Waiting for the Barbarians</strong>, <strong>Madness, Rack and Honey</strong>, <a href="http://catalog.hcpl.net/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&amp;aspect=subtab13&amp;term=grey%20album%20kevin%20young&amp;index=.GH"><strong>The Grey Album</strong></a>)</p>
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<p>From the Putting the Lie to the Accepted Wisdom Dept: Most of the very best critics do &quot;do&quot; and what&#39;s more, many of our best critics both &quot;do&quot; and teach. So there.</p>
<p>As always, thanks for reading, &#39;like&#39; us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/harriscountypl">Facebook</a>, and/or follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/harriscountypl">Twitter</a> (@harriscountypl). You should put any of your comments where they belong: in the comments box. They are appreciated, especially if you have an idea for a future blog post.</p>
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<script type='text/javascript'>stLight.options({publisher:''});</script>http://www.hcpl.net/content/everyones-critic-only-some-get-paid-be-natl-book-critics-circle-award-winners#commentsAwardsNational Book Critics Circle AwardsFri, 01 Mar 2013 15:41:11 +0000David Cherry12771 at http://www.hcpl.net